In his great aria "La calumnia," Don Basillo, the music master
of Rossini's Barber of Seville, graphically describes how evil whispers
grow, with appropriate watering, into truly grand and injurious calumnies.
For the less conniving among us, the same lesson may be read with opposite
intent: in adversity, try to contain. The desire to pin evil deeds upon
a single soul acting alone reflects this strategy; conspiracy theories have
a terrible tendency to ramify like Basillo's whispers until the runaway
solution to "whodunit" becomes "everybodydunit." But
conspiracies do occur. Even the pros and pols now doubt that Lee Harvey
Oswald [202] acted alone; and everybody did do it on the Orient Express.
2

The Piltdown case, surely the most famous and spectacular fraud of twentieth-century
science, has experienced this tension ever since its exposé in 1953
. The semiofficial, contained version holds that Charles Dawson, the lawyer
and amateur archeologist who "found" the first specimens, devised
and executed the entire plot himself. Since J. S. Weiner's elegant case
virtually precludes Dawson's innocence (The Piltdown Forgery, Oxford
University Press, 1955), conspiracies become the only reasonable refuge
for challengers. And proposals for coconspirators abound, ranging from the
great anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith to W. J. Sollas, professor of geology
at Oxford. I regard these claims as farfetched and devoid of reasonable
evidence. But I do believe that a conspiracy existed at Piltdown and that,
for once, the most interesting hypothesis is actually true. I believe that
a man who later became one of the world's most famous theologians, a cult
figure for many years after his death in 1955, knew what Dawson was doing
and probably helped in no small way-the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

TEILHARD AND PILTDOWN

Teilhard, born in Auvergne (central France) in 1881, belonged to an
old, conservative, and prosperous family. Entering the Society of Jesus
in 1902, he studied on the English island of Jersey from 1902 to 1905 and
then spent three years as a teacher of physics and chemistry at a Jesuit
school in Cairo. In 1908, he returned to finish his theological training
at the Jesuit seminary of Ore Place in Hastings, providentially located
right next to Piltdown on England's southeast coast. Here he stayed for
four years, and here he [203] was ordained a priest in 1912. 3 As a theological
student, Teilhard was talented enough, but lackadaisical. His passion at
Hastings was, as it always had been, natural history.

He scoured the countryside for butterflies, birds, and fossils. And,
in 1909, he met Charles Dawson at the focus of their common interests-in
a stone quarry, hunting for fossils. The two men became good friends and
colleagues in pursuit of their interest. Teilhard described Dawson to his
parents as "my correspondent in geology."

Dawson claimed that he had recovered the first fragment of Piltdown's
skull in 1908, after workmen at a gravel pit told him of a "coconut"
(the entire skull) they had unearthed and smashed at the site. Dawson kept
poking about, collecting a few more skull pieces and some fragments of other
fossil mammals. He did not bring his specimens to Arthur Smith Woodward,
keeper of paleontology at the British Museum, until the middle of 1912.
Thus, for three years before any professional ever heard of the Piltdown
material, Dawson and Teilhard were companions in natural history in the
environs of Piltdown.

Smith Woodward was not a secretive man, but he knew the value of what
Dawson had brought and the envy it might inspire. He clamped a tight lid
upon Dawson's information prior to its publication. He wanted none of Dawson's
lay friends at the site, and only one naturalist accompanied Dawson and
Smith Woodward in their first joint excavations at Piltdown-Teilhard de
Chardin, whom Dawson had described as "quite safe." More specimens
came to light during 1912, including the famous jaw with its two molar teeth,
artificially filed to simulate human patterns of wear. In December, Smith
Woodward published and the controversy began.

The skull fragments, although remarkably thick, could not be distinguished
from those of modern humans. The [204] jaw, on the other hand, except for
the wear of its teeth, loudly said "chimpanzee" to many experts
(in fact, it once belonged to an orangutan). No one smelled fraud, but many
professionals felt that parts of two creatures had been mixed together at
the Piltdown site. Smith Woodward stoutly defended the integrity of his
creature, arguing, with flawed logic, that the crucial role of brain power
in our mastery of the earth today implies a precocious role for large brains
in evolutionary history as well. A fully vaulted skull still attached to
an apish jaw vindicated such a brain-centered view of human evolution.

Teilhard left England late in 1912 4 to begin his graduate studies with
Marcellin Boule, the greatest physical anthropologist of France. But in
August 1913, he was back in England for a retreat at Ore Place. He also
spent several days prospecting with Dawson and on August 30 made a major
discovery himself-a canine tooth of the lower jaw, apish in appearance but
worn in a human fashion. Smith Woodward continued his series of publications
on the new material, but critics persisted in their belief that Piltdown
man represented two animals improperly united.

The impasse broke in Smith Woodward's favor in 1915. Dawson had been
prospecting at another site, two miles from Piltdown, for several years.
He probably took Teilhard there in 1913; we know that he searched the area
several times with Smith Woodward in 1914. Then, in January 1915, he wrote
to Smith Woodward. The second site, later called Piltdown 2, had yielded
its reward-"I believe we are in luck again. I have got a fragment of
the left side [it was actually the right] of a frontal bone with a portion
of the orbit and root of nose.-In July of the same year, he announced the
discovery of a lower molar, again, apish in [204] appearance but worn in
a human fashion. The bones of a human and an ape might wash into the same
gravel pit once, but the second, identical association of vaulted skull
and apish jaw surely proved the integrity of a single bearer, despite the
apparent anatomical incongruity. H. F. Osborn, America's leading paleontologist
and critic of the first Piltdown find, announced a conversion in his usual
grandiloquent fashion. Even Teilhard's teacher Marcellin Boule, leader of
the doubters, grumbled that the new finds had tipped the balance, albeit
slightly, in Smith Woodward's favor. Dawson did not live to enjoy his triumph,
for he died in 1916. Smith Woodward stoutly supported Piltdown for the rest
of his long life, devoting his last book (The Earliest Englishman, 1948)
to its defense. He died, mercifully, before his bubble burst.

Meanwhile, Teilhard pursued his calling with mounting fame, frustration,
and exhilaration. He served with distinction as a stretcher bearer in World
War I and then became professor of geology at the Institut Catholique of
Paris. But his unorthodox (although always pious) thinking soon led him
into irrevocable conflict with ecclesiastical authority. Ordered to abandon
his teaching post and to leave France, Teilhard departed for China in 1926.
There he remained for most of his life, pursuing distinguished research
in geology and paleontology and writing the philosophical treatises on cosmic
history and the reconciliation of science with religion that later made
him so famous. (They all remained unpublished, by ecclesiastical fiat, until
his death.) Teilhard died in 1955, but his passing only marked the beginning
of his meteoric rise to fame. His treatises, long suppressed, were published
and quickly translated into all major languages. The Phenomenon of Man
became a best seller throughout the world. Harvard's Widener Library
now houses an entire tier of books devoted to Teilhard's writing and thinking.
Two journals that were established to discuss his ideas still flourish.

Of the original trio-Dawson, Teilhard, and Smith Woodward-only Teilhard
was still living when Kenneth [206] Oakley, J. S. Weiner, and W. E. le Gros
Clark proved that the Piltdown bones had been chemically stained to mimic
great age, the teeth artificially filed to simulate human wear, the associated
mammal remains all brought in from elsewhere, and the flint "implements"
recently carved. The critics had been right all along, more right than they
had dared to imagine. The skull bones did belong to a modern human, the
jaw to an orangutan. As the shock of revelation gave way to the fascination
of whodunit, suspicion quickly passed from two members of the trio. Smith
Woodward had been too dedicated and too gullible; moreover, he knew nothing
of the site before Dawson brought him the original bones in 1912. (I have
no doubt whatsoever of Smith Woodward's total innocence.) Teilhard was too
famous and too present for any but the most discreet probing. He was dismissed
as a native young student who, forty years before, had been duped and used
by the crafty Dawson. Dawson acting alone became the official theory; professional
science was embarrassed, but absolved.

DOUBTS

I was just the right age for primal fascination-twelve years old-and
a budding paleontologist when news of the fraud appeared on page one of
the New York Times one morning at breakfast. My interest has never
abated, and 1 have, over the years, asked many senior paleontologists about
Piltdown. I have also remarked, both with amusement and wonder, that very
few believed the official tale of Dawson acting alone. I noted, in particular,
that several of the men I most admire suspected Teilhard, not so much on
the basis of hard evidence (for their suspicions rested on what I regard
as a weak point among the arguments), but from an intuitive feeling about
this man whom they knew well, loved, and respected, but who seemed to hide
passion, mystery, and good humor behind a garb of piety. A. S. Romer and
Bryan Patterson, two of America's leading vertebrate paleontologists and
my former colleagues at Harvard, often voiced their suspicions to me. Louis
Leakey voiced them in print, [207] without naming the name, but with no
ambiguity for anyone in the know (see his autobiography, By the Evidence
). 5

I finally decided to get off my butt and probe a bit after I
wrote a column on Piltdown for other reasons (Natural History, March
1979). 1 read all the official documents and concluded that nothing excluded
Teilhard, although nothing beyond his presence at Piltdown from the start
particularly implicated him either. I intended to drop the subject or to
pass it along to someone with a greater zeal for investigative reporting.
But at a conference in France last September, I happened to meet two of
Teilhard's closest colleagues, the leading paleontologist J. Piveteau and
the great zoologist P. P. Grassé. They greeted my suspicions with
a blustering "incroyable." Then Père Francois Russo,
Teilhard's friend and fellow Jesuit, heard of my inquiries and promised
to send me a document that would prove Teilhard's innocence-a copy of the
letter that Teilhard had written to Kenneth Oakley on November 28, 1953.
I received this letter in printed French translation (Teilhard wrote it
in English) in October 1979 and realized immediately that it contained an
inconsistency (a slip on Teilhard's part) most easily resolved by the hypothesis
of Teilhard's complicity. When I visited Oakley at Oxford in April 1980,
he showed me the original letter along with several others that Teilhard
had written to him. We studied the documents and discussed Piltdown for
the better part of a day, and I left convinced that Romer, Patterson, and
Leakey had been right. Oakley, who had noted the inconsistency but interpreted
it differently, agreed with me and stated as we parted: "I think it's
right that Teilhard was in it.." (Let me here express my deep appreciation
for Dr. Oakley's hospitality, his openness, and his simple, seemingly inexhaustible
kindness and helpfulness. I always feel so exhilarated when I discover-and
it is not so rare as many people imagine-that a great thinker is also an
exemplary human being.) [208] Since then, I have sharpened the basic arguments
and read through Teilhard's published work, finding a pattern that seems
hard to reconcile with his innocence. My case is, to be sure, circumstantial
(as is the case against Dawson or anyone else), but I believe that the burden
of proof must now rest with those who would hold Father Teilhard blameless.

The Case against Teilhard

THE LETTERS TO KENNETH OAKLEY

The main virtue of truth, quite apart from its ethical value (which
I hold to be considerable), is that it represents an infallible guide for
keeping your story straight. The problem with prevarication is that, when
the going gets complex or the recollection misty, it becomes very difficult
to remember all the details of your invented scheme. Richard Nixon finally
succumbed on a minor matter, and Sir Waiter Scott spoke truly when he wrote
the famous couplet: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/When first we
practice to deceive! "

Teilhard made just such a significant slip on a minor point in his letter
to Oakley. Teilhard offered no spontaneous recollections about Piltdown
and responded only to Oakley's direct inquiries for help in establishing
the forger's identity. He begins by congratulating Oakley "most sincerely
on your solution of the Piltdown problem. Anatomically speaking, 'Eoanthropus'
[Smith Woodward's name for the Piltdown animal] was a kind of monster.
. . . Therefore I am fundamentally pleased by your conclusions, in spite
of the fact that, sentimentally speaking, it spoils one of my brightest
and earliest paleontological memories."-

Teilhard then stonewalls on the question of fraud. He refuses to believe
it at all, declaring that Smith Woodward and Dawson (and, by implication,
himself) were not the kind [209] of men who could conceivably do such a
thing. Is it not possible, he asks, that some collector discarded the ape
bones in a gravel pit that legitimately contained a human skull, the product
of a recent interment? Could not the iron staining have been natural, since
the local water "can stain (with iron) at a remarkable speed"?
But Teilhard's notion can explain neither the artificial filing of the teeth
to simulate human wear nor the crucial discovery of a second combination
of ape and human at the Piltdown 2 site. In fact, Teilhard admits: "The
idea sounds fantastic. But, in my opinion, no more fantastic than to make
Dawson the perpetrator of a hoax."-

Teilhard then goes on to discuss Piltdown 2 and, in trying to exonerate
Dawson, makes his fatal error. He writes:

He [Dawson] just brought me to the site of Locality 2 and explained me
[sic] that he had found the isolated molar and the small pieces of skull
in the heaps of rubble and pebbles raked at the surface of the field.

But this cannot be. Teilhard did visit the second site with Dawson in
1913, but they did not find anything. Dawson "discovered- the skull
bones at Piltdown 2 in January 1915, and the tooth not until July 1915.
And now, the key point: Teilhard was mustered into the French army in December
1914 and was shipped immediately to the front, where he remained until the
war ended. He could not have seen the remains of Piltdown 2 with Dawson,
unless they had manufactured them together before he left (Dawson died in
1916).

Oakley caught the inconsistency immediately when he received Teilhard's
letter in 1953, but he read it differently and for good reason. At that
time, Oakley and his colleagues were just beginning their explorations into
whodunit. They rightly suspected Dawson and had written to Teilhard to gather
evidence. Oakley read Teilhard's statement when he was simply trying to
establish the basic fact of Dawson's guilt. In that context, he assumed
that Dawson had shown the specimens to Teilhard in 1913, but had withheld
them from [210] Smith Woodward until 1915-more evidence for Dawson's complicity.

Oakley wrote back immediately, and Teilhard, realizing that he had tripped,
began to temporize. In his second letter of January 29, 1954, he tried to
recoup:

Concerning the point of "history" you ask me, my "souvenirs"
are a little vague. Yet, by elimination (and since Dawson died during
the First World War, if 1 am correct) my visit with Dawson to the second
site (where the two small fragments of skull and the isolated molar
were found in the rubble) must have been in late July 1913 [it was probably
in early August].

Obviously troubled, he then penned the following postscript.

When I visited the site no. 2 (in 1913?) the two small fragments of skull
and tooth had already been found, I believe. But your very question makes
me doubtful! Yes, 1 think definitely they had been already found:
and that is the reason why Dawson pointed to me the little heaps of raked
pebbles as the place of the "discovery."

In a final letter to Mable Kenward, daughter of the owner of Barkham
Manor, site of the first Piltdown find, Teilhard drew back even further:
"Dawson showed me the field where the second skull (fragments) were
found. But, as I wrote to Oakley, I cannot remember whether it was after
or before the find" (March 2, 1954).

I can devise only four interpretations for Teilhard's slip. 1. I thought
initially, when I had only read the first letter, that one might interpret
Teilhard's statement thus: Dawson took me to the site in 1913 and later
stated in wartime correspondence that he had found the fragments in the
rubble. But Teilhard's second letter states explicitly that Dawson, in the
flesh, had pointed to the spot at Piltdown 2 where he had found the specimens.

[211] 2. Oakley's original hypothesis: Dawson showed the specimens to
an innocent Teilhard in 1913, but withheld them from Smith Woodward until
1915. But Dawson would not blow his cover in such a crude way. For Dawson
took Smith Woodward to the second site on several prospecting trips in 1914,
always finding nothing. Now Teilhard and Smith Woodward were also fairly
close. Dawson had introduced them in 1909 by sending to London some important
mammal specimens (having nothing to do with Piltdown) that Teilhard had
collected. Smith Woodward was delighted with Teilhard's work and praised
him lavishly in a publication. He accepted Teilhard as the only other member
of their initial collecting trips at Piltdown. Moreover, Teilhard was a
house guest of the Smith Woodwards when he visited London in September 1913,
following his discovery of the canine. If Dawson had shown Teilhard the
Piltdown 2 finds in 1913, then led Smith Woodward extensively astray during
several field trips in 1914, and if an innocent Teilhard had told Smith
Woodward about the specimens (and I can't imagine why he would have held
back), then Dawson would have been exposed.

3. Teilhard never did hear about the Piltdown 2 specimens from Dawson,
but simply forgot forty years later that he had never actually viewed the
fossils he had read about later. This is the only alternative (to Teilhard's
complicity) that I view as at all plausible. Were the letters not filled
with other damaging points, and the case against Teilhard not supported
on other grounds, I would take this possibility more seriously.

4. Teilhard and Dawson planned the Piltdown 2 discovery before Teilhard
left England. Forty years later, Teilhard misconstructed the exact chronology,
forgot that he could not have seen the specimens when they were officially
"found," and slipped in writing to Oakley.

Teilhard's letters to Oakley contain other curious statements, each
insignificant (or subject to other interpretations) by itself, but forming
in their ensemble a subtle attempt to direct suspicion away from himself.

[214] 1. In his letter of November 28, 1953, Teilhard states that he
first met Dawson in 1911. In fact, they met in May 1909, for Teilhard describes
the encounter in a vivid letter to his parents. Moreover, this meeting was
an important event in Teilhard's career, for Dawson befriended the young
priest and personally forged his path to professional notice and respect
by sending some important specimens he had collected to Smith Woodward.
When Smith Woodward described this material before the Geological Society
of London in 1911, Dawson, in the discussion following Smith Woodward's
talk, paid tribute to the "patient and skilled assistance" given
to him by Teilhard since 1909. 1 don't regard this, in itself, as a particularly
damning point. A first meeting in 1911 would still be early enough for complicity
(Dawson "found" his first piece of the Piltdown skull in 1911,
although he states that a workman had given him a fragment "several
years before"), and 1 would never hold a mistake of two years against
a man who tried to remember the event forty years later. Still, the later
(and incorrect) date, right upon the heels of Dawson's first "find,"
certainly averts suspicion from Teilhard.

2. Oakley wrote again in February 1954, probing further into Dawson's
first contact with the Piltdown material, wondering in particular what had
happened in 1908. Teilhard simply replied (March 1, 1954): "In 1908
1 did not know Dawson." True enough, but they met just a few months
later, and Teilhard might have mentioned it. A small point, to be sure.

3. In the same letter, Teilhard tries further to avert suspicion by
writing of his years at Hastings: "You know, at that time, I was a
young student in theology-not allowed to leave much his cell of Ore Place
(Hastings)." But this description of a young, pious, and restricted
man stands in stark contrast with the picture that Teilhard painted of himself
at the time in a remarkable series of letters to his parents (Lettres
de Hastings et de Paris 1908-1912, Paris: Aubier, 1965). These letters
speak little of theology, but they are filled with charming and detailed
accounts of Teilhard's frequent wanderings all over southern England. Eleven
let[213]ters refer to excursions with Dawson, 6 and no other naturalist
is mentioned so frequently. If he spent much time at Ore Place, he didn't
choose to write about it. On August 13, 1910, for example, he exclaims:
"I have travelled up and down the coast, to the left and right of Hastings;
thanks to the cheap trains [lescheaptrains as he writes in
French] so common at this time of year, it is easy to go far with minimal
expense."

Perhaps I am now too blinded by my own attraction to the hypothesis
of Teilhard's complicity. Perhaps all these points are minor and unrelated,
testifying only to the faulty memory of an aging man. But they do form an
undeniable pattern. Still, 1 would not now come forward with my case were
it not for a second argument, more circumstantial to be sure, but somehow
more compelling in its persistent pattern of forty years-the record of Teilhard's
letters and publications.

PILTDOWN IN TEILHARD'S WRITING

I remember a jokebook I had as a kid. The index listed "mule, sex
life," but the indicated page was blank (ridiculous, in any case, for
mules do not abstain just because the odd arrangement of their hybrid chromosomes
debars them from bearing offspring). Teilhard's published record on Piltdown
is almost equally blank. In 1920, he wrote one short article in French for
a popular journal on Le cas de 1'homme de Piltdown. After this, virtually
all is silence. Piltdown never again received as much as a full sentence
in all his published work (except once in a footnote). Teilhard mentioned
Piltdown only when he could scarcely avoid it-in comprehensive review articles
that discuss all outstanding human fossils. I can find fewer than half a
dozen references in the twenty-three volumes of his complete works. In each
case, [214] Piltdown appears either as an item listed without comment in
a footnote or as a point (also without comment) on a drawing of the human
evolutionary tree or as a partial phrase within a sentence about Neanderthal
man. 7

Consider just how exceedingly curious this is. In his first letter to
Oakley, Teilhard described his work at Piltdown as "one of my brightest
and earliest paleontological memories." Why, then, such silence? Was
Teilhard simply too [215] diffident or saintly to toot his own trumpet?
Scarcely, since no theme receives more voluminous attention, in scores of
later articles, than his role in unearthing the legitimate Peking man in
China.

As I began my investigation into this extraordinary silence, and trying
to be as charitable as 1 could, I constructed two possible exonerating reasons
for Teilhard's failure to discuss the major event of his paleontological
youth. Kenneth Oakley then told me of the 1920 article, the only analysis
of Piltdown that Teilhard ever published. 1 found a copy in the ten-volume
edition of Teilhard's oeuvre scientifique, and realized that its
content invalidated the only exculpatory arguments I could construct.

The first argument: Marcellin Boule, Teilhard's revered teacher,
was a leading critic of Piltdown. He regarded it as a mixture of two creatures
(not as a fraud), although he softened his opposition after he learned of
the subsequent discovery at Piltdown 2. Perhaps Boule upbraided his young
student for gullibility, and Teilhard, embarrassed to the quick, never spoke
of the infernal creature, or of his role in discovering it, again.

The 1920 article invalidates such a conjecture, for in this work, Teilhard
comes down squarely on the right side. He mentions that his English companions,
convinced by finding the jaw so close to the skull fragments, never doubted
the integrity of their fossil. Teilhard then notes, with keen insight, that
experts who had not seen the specimens in situ would be swayed primarily
by the formal anatomy of the bones themselves, and that these bones loudly
proclaimed: human skull, ape's jaw. Which emphasis, then, shall prevail,
geology or anatomy? Although he had witnessed the geology, Teilhard opted
for anatomy:

In order to admit such a combination of forms [a human skull and an ape's
jaw in the same creature], it is necessary that we be forced to such a conclusion.
Now this is not the case here. . . . The reasonable attitude is to grant
primacy to the intrinsic morphological probability over the extrinsic probability
of geologi[216]cal conditions.... We must suppose that the Piltdown skull
and jaw belong to two different subjects.

Teilhard called it once, and he called it right. He had no reason to
be embarrassed.

The second argument: Perhaps Teilhard had reveled in his role
at Piltdown, cherished the memory, but simply found that the man he had
helped to unearth could offer no support for, or even contact with, the
concerns of his later career. On a broad level, this argument is implausible,
if only because Teilhard wrote several general reviews about human fossils;
however controversial or dubious, Piltdown should have been discussed. Even
the leading doubters never failed to air their suspicions. Boule wrote chapters
about Piltdown. Teilhard listed it without comment a few times and only
when he had no choice.

In a more specific area, Teilhard's silence about Piltdown becomes inexplicable
to the point of perversity (unless guilt and knowledge of fraud engendered
it)-for Piltdown provided the best available support that fossils could
provide for the most important argument of Teilhard's cosmic and mystical
views about evolution, the dominant theme of his career and the source of
his later fame. Teilhard never availed himself of his own best weapon, partly
provided by his own hand.

The conclusion that skull and jaw belonged to different creatures did
not destroy the scientific value of Piltdown, provided that both animals
legitimately lay in the strata that supposedly entombed them. For these
strata were older than any housing Neanderthal man, Europe's major claim
to anthropological fame. Neanderthal, although now generally considered
as a race of our species, was a low-vaulted, beetle-browed fellow of decidedly
"primitive" cast. Piltdown, despite the thickness of its skull
bones, looked more modern in its globular vault. The assignment of the jaw
to a fossil ape further enhanced the skull's advanced status. Humans of
modern aspect must have lived in England even before Neanderthal man evolved
on the continent. Neanderthal, therefore, cannot be an ancestral form; it
must [217] represent a side branch of the human tree. Human evolution is
not a ladder but a series of lineages evolving along separate paths. In
the 1920 article, Teilhard presented the Piltdown skull, divorced from its
jaw, in just that light-as proof that hominids evolved as a bundle of lineages
moving in similar directions. He wrote:

Above all, it is henceforth proved that even at this time [of Piltdown]
a race of men existed, already included in our present human line, and very
different from those that would become Neanderthal. . . . Thanks to the
discovery of Mr. Dawson, the human race appears to us even more distinctly,
in these ancient times, as formed of strongly differentiated bundles, already
quite far from their point of divergence. For anyone who has an idea of
paleontological realities, this light, tenuous as it appears, illuminates
great depths.

To what profundity, then, did Teilhard refer Piltdown as evidence? Teilhard
believed that evolution moved in an intrinsic direction representing the
increasing domination of spirit over matter. Under the thrall of matter,
lineages would diverge to become more unlike, but all would move upward
in the same general direction. With man, evolution reached its crux. Spirit
had begun its domination over matter, adding a new layer of thought-the
noosphere above the older biosphere. Divergence would be stemmed; indeed,
convergence had already begun in the process of human socialization. Convergence
will continue as spirit prevails. When the last vestiges of matter have
been discarded, spirit will involute upon itself at a single point called
Omega and identified with God-the mystical evolutionary apocalypse that
secured Teilhard's fame. 8

But convergence is a thing of the future. Scientists seeking evidence
for such a scheme must look to the past for [218] twin signs of divergence
accompanied by similar upward direction-in other words, for multiple,
parallel lineages within larger groups.

I have read all of Teilhard's papers from the early 1920s. No theme
receives more emphasis than the search for multiple, parallel lineages.
In an article on fossil tarsiers, written in 1921, he argues that three
separate primate lineages extend back to the dawn of the age of mammals,
each evolving in the same direction of larger brains and smaller faces.
In a review published in 1922 of Marcellin Boule's Les hommes fossiles,
Teilhard writes: "Evolution is no more to be represented in a few
simple strokes for us than for other living things; but it resolves itself
into innumerable lines which diverge at such length that they appear parallel."
In a general essay on evolution, printed in 1921, he speaks continually
of oriented evolution in multiple, parallel lines within mammals.

But where was Piltdown in this extended paean of praise for multiple,
parallel lineages? Piltdown provided proof, the only available proof, of
multiple, parallel lineages within human evolution itself-for its skull
belonged to an advanced human older than primitive Neanderthal. Piltdown
was the most sublime argument that Teilhard possessed, and he never breathed
it again after the 1920 article.

These two arguments have been abstract. A third feature of the 1920
article is stunning in its directness. For 1 believe that Teilhard fleetingly
tried to tell his colleagues, too subtly perhaps, that Piltdown was a phony.
In discussing whether the Piltdown remains represent one or two animals,
Teilhard laments that the direct and infallible test cannot be applied.
One skull fragment contained a perfect glenoid fossa, the point of articulation
for the upper jaw upon the lower. Yet the corresponding point of the lower
jaw, the condyle, was missing on a specimen otherwise beautifully preserved
at its posterior end. Teilhard writes: "Since the glenoid fossa exists
in perfect state on the temporal bone, we could simply have tried to articulate
the pieces, if the mandible had preserved its condyle: we could have
learned, without possible doubt, if the two fit together." I read this
statement in a drowsy state one morning at two o'clock, but the next line-set
off by Teilhard as a paragraph in itself terminated by an exclamation point-destroyed
any immediate thought of sleep:-"As if on purpose [comme par exprès
1, the condyle is missing!"

"Comme par exprès." I couldn't get those words
out of my mind for two days. Yes, it could be a literary line, a permissible
metaphor for emphasis. But I think that Teilhard was trying to tell us something
he didn't dare reveal directly.

OTHER ARGUMENTS

1. Teilhard's embarrassment at Oakley's disclosure. Kenneth Oakley told
me that, although he had not implicated Teilhard in his thoughts, one aspect
of Teilhard's reaction had always puzzled him. All other scientists, including
those who had cause for the most profound embarrassment (like the aged Sir
Arthur Keith, who had used Piltdown for forty years as the bedrock of his
thought), expressed keen interest amidst their chagrin. They all congratulated
Oakley spontaneously and thanked him for resolving an issue that had always
been puzzling, even though the solution hurt so deeply. Teilhard said nothing.
His congratulations arrived only when they could not be avoided-in the preface
to a letter responding to Oakley's direct inquiries. When Teilhard visited
London, Oakley tried to discuss Piltdown, but .Teilhard always changed the
subject. He took Teilhard to a special exhibit at the British Museum illustrating
how the hoax had been uncovered. Teilhard glumly walked through as fast
as he could, eyes averted, saying nothing. (A. S. Romer told me several
years ago that he also tried to conduct Teilhard through the same exhibit,
and with the same strange reaction.) Finally, Teilhard's secretary took
Oakley aside and explained that Piltdown was a sensitive subject with Father
Teilhard.

But why? If he had been gulled by Dawson at the site, he had certainly
recouped his pride. Smith Woodward had devoted his life to Dawson's concoction.
Teilhard had written about it but once, called it as correctly as he could,
and [220] then shut up. Why be so embarrassed? Unless, of course, the embarrassment
arose from guilt about another aspect of his silence-his inability to come
clean while he watched men he loved and respected make fools of themselves,
partly on his account. Marcellin Boule, his beloved master, for example,
correctly called Smith Woodward's Eoanthropus "an artificial
and composite being" in the first edition of Les hommes fossiles
(1921).The skull, he said, could belong to "unbourgeois
de Londres ",. the jaw belonged to an ape. But he pondered
the significance of Piltdown 2and changed his mind in the second
edition of 1923: "In the light of these new facts, I cannot be as sure
as I was before. I recognize that the balance has now tipped a bit in the
direction of Smith Woodward's hypothesis-and I am happy for this scientist
whose knowledge and character I esteem equally." How did Teilhard feel
as he watched his beloved master, Boule, failing into the abyss-when he
contained tools for extraction that he could not use.

2.The elephant and the hippo. Bits and pieces of other fossil
mammals were salted into the Piltdown gravels in order to set a geologic
matrix for the human finds. All but two of these items could have been collected
in England. But the hippo teeth, belonging to a distinctive dwarfed species,
probably came from the Mediterranean island of Malta. The elephant tooth
almost surely came from a distinctive spot at Ichkeul, Tunisia, for it is
highly radioactive as a result of seepage from surrounding sediments rich
in uranium oxide. This elephant species has been found in several other
areas, but nowhere else in such highly radioactive sediments. Moreover,
the lchkeul site was only discovered by professionals in 1947; the doctored
specimen at Piltdown could not have come from a cataloged museum collection.

Teilhard taught physics and chemistry at a Jesuit school in Cairo from
1905 to 1908. Just before coming to Piltdown. His volume of Letters from
Egypt again records little about theology and teaching, but much about
travel, natural his[221]tory, and collecting. He did not call at Tunisia
or Malta on his passage down, but I can find no record of his passage back,
and the two areas are right on his route from Cairo to France. In any case,
Teilhard's letters from Cairo abound in tales of swapping and exchange with
other natural historians of several North African nations. He was plugged
into an amateur network of information and barter and might have received
the teeth from a colleague.

This argument formed the base of evidence among my senior colleagues
who suspected Teilhard-A. S. Romer, Bryan Patterson, and Louis Leakey (Leakey
also mentioned Teilhard's knowledge of chemistry and the clever staining
of the Piltdown bones). According to hearsay, le Gros Clark himself, a member
of the trio that exposed the hoax, also suspected Teilhard on this basis.
I regard this argument as suggestive, but not compelling. Dawson too was
plugged into a network of amateur exchange.

3. Teilhard's good luck at Piltdown. Although records are frustratingly
vague, I believe that all the Piltdown pieces were found by the original
trio-Dawson, Smith Woodward, and Teilhard. (In the official version, a workman
may have given Dawson the first piece in 1908.) Dawson, of course, unearthed
most of the material himself. Smith Woodward, so far as I can tell, found
only one cranial fragment. Teilhard, who spent less time at Piltdown than
his two colleagues, was blessed. He found a fragment of the elephant tooth,
a worked flint, and the famous canine.

People who have never collected in the field probably do not realize
how difficult and chancy the operation is when fossils are sparse. There
is no magic to it, just hard work. A tooth in a gravel pit is about as conspicuous
as the proverbial needle in a haystack. The hoaxer worked hard on his Piltdown
material. He filed the canine and painted it to simulate age. Apes' teeth
are not easy to come by. If I had but one precious item, I would not stick
it into a large gravel heap and then hope that some innocent companion would
find it. It would probablybe lost forever, not triumphantly [222]
recovered. I doubt that I would ever find it again myself, after someone
else had mucked about extensively in the pile.

Teilhard described his discovery in the first letter to Oakley: "When
I found the canine, it was so inconspicuous amidst the gravels which had
been spread on the ground for sifting that it seems to me quite unlikely
that the tooth could have been planted. I can even remember Sir Arthur congratulating
me on the sharpness of my eyesight." -Smith Woodward's recollection
(from his last book of 1948) is more graphic:

We were excavating a rather deep and hot trench in which Father Teilhard,
in black clothing, was especially energetic; and, as we thought he seemed
a little exhausted, we suggested that he should leave us to do the hard
labor for a time while he had comparative rest in searching the rain-washed
spread gravel. Very soon he exclaimed that he had picked up the missing
canine tooth, but we were incredulous, and told him we had already seen
several bits of ironstone, which looked like teeth, on the spot where he
stood. He insisted, however, that he was not deceived, so we both left our
digging to go and verify his discovery. There could be no doubt about it,
and we all spent the rest of that day until dusk crawling over the gravel
in the vain quest for more.

I also have some doubt about Teilhard's flint, for it is the only Piltdown
item indubitably found in situ. All the other specimens either came from
gravel heaps that had been dug up and spread upon the ground or cannot be
surely traced. Now in situ can signify one of two things (and the records
do not permit a distinction). It may mean that the gravel bed lay exposed
in a ditch, cliff, or road cut-in which case, anyone might have stuck the
flint in. But it may mean that Teilhard dug into the layer from undisturbed,
overlying ground-in which case, he could only have planted the flint himself.

[223] Again, I regard this argument only as suggestive, not as definitive.
It is the weakest point of all, hence its place at the bottom of my list.
Perhaps Teilhard was simply a particularly keen observer.